[Gluster-users] PLEASE READ ! We need your opinion. GSOC-2014 and the Gluster community

[Carlos Capriotti]

Hello, all.

I am a little bit impressed by the lack of action on this topic. I hate to
be "that guy", specially being new here, but it has to be done.

If I've got this right, we have here a chance of developing Gluster even
further, sponsored by Google, with a dedicated programmer for the summer.

In other words, if we play our cards right, we can get a free programmer
and at least a good start/advance on this fantastic.

Well, I've checked the trello board, and there is a fair amount of things
there.

There are a couple of things that are not there as well.

I think it would be nice to listen to the COMMUNITY (yes, that means YOU),
for either suggestions, or at least a vote.

My opinion, being also my vote, in order of PERSONAL preference:

1) There is a project going on (https://forge.gluster.org/disperse), that
consists on re-writing the stripe module on gluster. This is specially
important because it has a HUGE impact on Total Cost of Implementation
(customer side), Total Cost of Ownership, and also matching what the
competition has to offer. Among other things, it would allow gluster to
implement a RAIDZ/RAID5 type of fault tolerance, much more efficient, and
would, as far as I understand, allow you to use 3 nodes as a minimum
stripe+replication. This means 25% less money in computer hardware, with
increased data safety/resilience.

2) We have a recurring issue with split-brain solution. There is an entry
on trello asking/suggesting a mechanism that arbitrates this resolution
automatically. I pretty much think this could come together with another
solution that is file replication consistency check.

3) Accelerator node project. Some storage solutions out there offer an
"accelerator node", which is, in short, a, extra node with a lot of RAM,
eventually fast disks (SSD), and that works like a proxy to the regular
volumes. active chunks of files are moved there, logs (ZIL style) are
recorded on fast media, among other things. There is NO active project for
this, or trello entry, because it is something I started discussing with a
few fellows just a couple of days ago. I thought of starting to play with
RAM disks (tmpfs) as scratch disks, but, since we have an opportunity to do
something more efficient, or at the very least start it, why not ?

Now, c'mon ! Time is running out. We need hands on deck here, for a simple
vote !

Can you share 3 lines with your thoughts ?

Thanks
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://supercolony.gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/attachments/20140313/309de272/attachment.html>